I'm one of those exciting college students who does exciting college things like reading books and talking to professors about the more profound things in life. But perhaps that is an not entirely accurate oversimplification; I'm a junior at Ohio Wesleyan University who adores our campus whilst majoring in German and English. I tutor German for the Modern Foreign Languages department and am the fall president of the Medieval and Renaissance Recreational Combat Association.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

- German presentation on Faber-Castell (PowerPoint, no length specified! Yay only having one day for the class to present?) [edit: I love knowing how to make a classy PowerPoint fast when it’s a simple presentation on a classy company.]

- study for exams… yay

- Cultural Geography presentation- class version (20 minutes of me babbling on about Haiti with a focuss on Voodoun to a powerpoint that currently is not a little far from being impressive. Or done. Or existing much, for that matter.)

- get that book out and look it over… meaning study for exams.

- Cultural Geography final exam take-home test thing which involves a lot of pecking at keys. Might want to get on that, yeah.

- my first exam-exam is on Monday night. 7:30 PM. I should probably think about that.

- that massive “short” paper for German. (If 12-ish pages is short, but considering my topic it’s not really so bad… It just seems bigger, even when you have a nice chunk of it done already with a lot left to say. Thank you Faber for having such a long history and not releasing many numbers having to do with your business?) Mostly just blah of dealing with word thinking I am incapable of spelling anything and everything.

- I’m sure I’m forgetting something, and am too comfortable with my tea to bother with buggering about my schedule board thing that is the God of All Things Important That Are Due And/Or Coming Up. I love my GoATITADA/OCU. Keeps me sane when I can see a trip with my Oma not soon after all the angry fluorescent orange of tests and papers. But I digress. Oh, yes, and the Modern Foreign Language picnic is this Thursday. I can’t miss that. Very important! …it just got crowded out by the panic of my presentations, so.

Things I am doing:

- Doing a poor job of convincing myself that it is not time for me to sketch something.- Typing this. Which is semi-productive, so yay?- Listening to weird music with a beat. The beat is important to getting and staying on task!!- Wondering at the popularity of some shows and how they ever managed to get on the television in the first place… that sort of thing sells, one supposes, and all of my roommates never miss it, so…- Worrying about trimming my new acacia bonsai. And worrying about said bonsai being hit with a ball as one of my roommates practices juggling. Including kick-tricks.- Feeling overwhelmed, as always, with the last few weeks- Wondering if the above comment is worth my time, but knowing it cannot be helped- Drinking tea. Always. Right now it is cold and supposedly green. Maybe a hot one later.- Being a tea-snob and mentally complaining about the Welch room that stores their tea on the windowsill, which is a terrible storage place. I’ll spare you the details.- Needing to finish this so that I can get back to doing something that will help reduce, at least in theory, the panic of these last few days.

German Wordness:Der perfeckte Bleistift!! ‘The perfect pencil’, and for so little? I swear Faber is just giving them away. I also read an article that their world’s largest pencil may have been beaten by a few feet. I wonder if they would send out German ninja (because such beings exist) to draw the world’s largest caricature and then erase it so that the pencil would shrink in size, allowing the Faber Bleistift to remaian der groesste Bleistift der Welt. I also contemplated them just breaking the lead, but that’s not nearly half as exciting.

Pictures:It snowed here last night? What? Ohio is in the wind tunnel. And by Thursday it will be 70* again and no one need worry. Anyway, spring is in full fling, making campus gorgeous and delightfully smelly, in both good and bad ways. (see [or should I say smell?]: lilac bushes [our campus has a lovely range of lilac colours; everything from white to lilac to maroon to an antiqued pink!!] and crab apple trees. Beautiful trees, but not so easy on the nose when the wind picks up.)

Aforementioned acacia tree with obligatory kimono with fan design as a backdrop.

...and then it became startlingly clear to everyone why the university had bothered to keep such gnarled and deformed beings around.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Earth Day was this week, and I am so on top of things that I still cannot tell anyone with 100% certainty which day it fell on. I have a guess that I’d be willing to bet a modest amount on, but little better. I, however, do not remorse this inability to identify days, because as far as I’m concerned every day should be earth day. (And I planted out six trees over the weekend and got two new ones in the mail, so not really feeling guilty about it.)The university (I’m not sure of specifically what organizations or bits of it, but people associated with OWU, anyway) planted a few trees, including three red-buds and a buckeye, and possibly one other that I have not investigated closely enough to identify. This was heartening, as the university had several trees cut down, for what reasons I do not know, so I thought to myself that they were around one-up from where they were, calculating it out. And then I noticed the stump and piles of saw dust where the campus’s only larch tree was once located. No idea what they were thinking there… alright, it did look a little wonky, but it was an older tree with character, and the only larch on campus! At least it dropped enough pinecones to hopefully yield at least one larch that I can plant in its honour. (I’m bordering on Werther-level here, I know, but at least I’m doing something about it and not going to cry to Lotte about it before wandering about in the night like a wolf. Oh, Werther.)

German Word: Why would I use the verb ermorden, meaning ‘to murder’ for this week’s word? I wonder. (Werther, I know, I know. He should have just planted another walnut tree and made sure it survived. Honestly. Any nature-freak like that should at least put some effort into it.)

Pictures:

I'm so cool, I know, finding a large carp in the Delaware Run. There's a lot of these fellows in there, though.

Not labeled: how horrible my hand writing is. And, yes, that buckeye tree is smiling. He's happy to see you.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Campus finally feels like campus again. It’s an odd sensation, when one finally feels something click and thinks, “This is my campus. I’m home,” after a long, cold, alienating winter. I, at least, feel like the cold and layers of snow somehow barricade me from some essential part of campus that I treasure, something that has only returned with the flowers of spring. Perhaps it is merely that I am easily miffed about not being able to commune with nature whenever the fancy strikes me without pulling on eighty layers of coats and sweatshirts and five scarves. But I exaggerate. Campus is indeed in bloom, however, and the magnolia bushes and trees in particular are putting on a great show. Even the trees that I winterized in the room (yes, ignore what most people tell you; you can winterize trees indoors, at least small ones. The tiny ginkgo next to me right now is proof of this, though I do grant doing this with larger trees would be… tricky.) are sprouting tiny green leaves of their own. The end of the year is nigh, though, so enjoying such beauty while one can is even more transient than it first appears…. Everything seems to happen within the last month of things. I have so much to do within the next few weeks that I loathe thinking on it, but presentations and papers wait on no one, and meetings setting things up for next year are more than a bit important as well. I can, at the least, say that I know where and with whom I plan to room, so at least that headache is in order. (Setting up rooming for the next year is a peculiar “lottery” of sorts that seems more confusing and stressful than I am sure that it is.)

In the recent past I attended a talk and tasting on tea and its health benefits, an amazing and moving organ concert I dare not belittle with words, a talk by Dr. Deborah Lipstadt on her trial against David Irving (a case that involved Holocaust denial; if you’re interested, I suggest Google-ing it), and probably a few other things I cannot recall at the moment. In short, busy. Tonight I still need to run to a geology talk and go to Stammtisch besides my normal getting of things done! Fun? You bet your sweet bippy.

German Word:Ich moechte fertig sein… I want to be finished. Papers are just that exciting.

Pictures:Ham-Will acting all cool one evening…

Robert Griffith is amazing, and you should give him a high-five for being being awesome.

Cool profs teach outside when it gets hot.

...yeah, the vague pun there doesn't really work, I know.

This is the Faerie Tree; he enjoys keeping a garden of violet flowers (not violets, though) in his roots every spring. His hobbies also include...